Imagine it’s your first day at work. You’re highly optimistic about playing a part in your company’s vision as well as refining your technical skills. But since it’s your first day on the job, you have little idea about or how things operate at your new office.
To help you figure out where to start, your superior needs to outline the goals and results you need to achieve during the onboarding process.
Visit site to understand how you can help your business commit to a particular direction/goal and help improve better employee performance significantly.
A good way of doing this is by using the OKR (objectives and key results) system that high-achieving companies such as LinkedIn and Google use. The OKR system is a widely accepted practice to set individual, department, and overall organizational goals.
Organizations of varying sizes use this system to give employees direction and motivate performance. Some, however, use a top-down goal-setting system that usually ends up leaving the company in a situation where they aren’t clear what goals they need to set.
The following is a detailed breakdown of what OKRs and how they work.
What Are OKRs
Objectives and Key Results, or OKRs, is a tool companies use to achieve their targets by outlining certain measurable actions to achieve those goals and monitoring the overall progress.
Objectives will define the direction you want to take as a company. They should be brief, precise, and ambitious. Companies usually create 3 to 5 high-level goals every quarter that align with the overall vision of the company. Examples of objectives are increasing revenue by 35% or releasing a new product into the market.
Key results are the outcomes defined by each goal so you can measure your progress toward realizing that goal. Every objective should have between 2 and 5 practical measurable deliverables. Examples of key results could be a reduction in production costs by 15% or generating 2,000 leads.
Why OKRs Work
There are three reasons why OKRs are so effective. First, OKRs are bound by time. Setting a deadline for you to achieve a target compels a company’s workforce to solve the problem within a given time frame. After the time period has elapsed, you can now measure if you’ve made significant progress or not towards your overall goal.
OKRs also work because they require the involvement of several individuals. For instance, working towards bettering the sales funnel efficiency of a company is not the work of a single group.
It involves several departments working together. Marketing will have to create and implement new marketing campaigns, the IT team may have to work on a client landing page, and sales may reconsider how they manage accounts.
The third reason OKRs are so efficient is that they use simple language to address a particular issue. It helps answer questions that help define company vision and direction so that employees can have a clear understanding of the results they need to work towards.
The Bottom Line
The success of a company’s OKRs depends on how well they are written. They need to be simple, precise and aligned to the needs of the business. The results should be both practical and measurable. This can go a long way in aligning every employee in the organization.
